What Technology Wants (24 page)

Plotting Moore's Law.
The original chart of Moore's Law contained only five data points and a bold extrapolation for the next 10 years (left). The continuation of Moore's Law since 1968 (right).

Moore hooked up with Carver Mead, a fellow Caltech alumnus. Mead was an electrical engineer and early transistor expert. In 1967 Moore asked Mead what kind of theoretical limits were in store for microelectronic miniaturization. Mead had no idea, but as he did his calculations he made an amazing discovery: The efficiency of the chip would increase by the cube of the scale's reduction. The benefits from shrinking were exponential. Microelectronics would not only become cheaper, but they would also become better. As Moore puts it, “By making things smaller, everything gets better simultaneously. There is little need for tradeoffs. The speed of our products goes up, the power consumption goes down, system reliability improves by leaps and bounds, but especially the cost of doing things drops as a result of the technology.”

Today when we stare at the plot of Moore's Law we can spot several striking characteristics of its 50-year run. First, this is a picture of
acceleration
. The straight line marks not just an increase, but a 10-time increase for each point on the line (because the horizontal axis is an exponential scale). Silicon computation is not simply getting better, but getting better faster and faster. Relentless acceleration for five decades is rare in biology and unknown in the technium before this century. So this graph is as much about the phenomenon of cultural acceleration as about silicon chips. In fact, Moore's Law has come to represent the principle of an accelerating future that underpins our expectations of the technium.

Second, even a cursory glance reveals the astounding regularity of Moore's line. From the earliest points its progress has been eerily mechanical. Without interruption for 50 years, chips improve exponentially at the same speed of acceleration, neither more nor less. It could not be more straight if it had been engineered by a technological tyrant. Is it really possible that this strict, unwavering trajectory came about via the chaos of the global marketplace and uncoordinated, ruthless scientific competition? Is Moore's Law a direction pushed forward by the nature of matter and computation, or is this steady growth an artifact of economic ambition?

Moore and Mead themselves believe the latter. Writing in 2005, on the 40th anniversary of his law, Moore says, “Moore's Law is really about economics.” Carver Mead made it clearer yet: Moore's Law, he says, “is really about people's belief system, it's not a law of physics, it's about human belief, and when people believe in something, they'll put energy behind it to make it come to pass.” In case that was not clear enough, he spells it out further:

Finally, in another reference, Carver Mead adds: “Permission to believe that [the law] will keep going” is what keeps the law going. Gordon Moore agreed in a 1996 article: “More than anything, once something like this gets established, it becomes more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Semiconductor Industry Association puts out a technology road map, which continues this [generational improvement] every three years. Everyone in the industry recognizes that if you don't stay on essentially that curve they will fall behind. So it sort of drives itself.”

Clearly, expectations of future progress guide current investments, not just in semiconductors but in all aspects of technology. The invariant curve of Moore's Law helps focus money and intelligence on very specific goals—keeping up with the law. The only problem with accepting self-constructed goals as the source of such regular progress is that other technologies that might benefit from the same belief do not show the same zooming rise. Why don't we see Moore's Law type of growth in the performance of jet engines or steel alloys or corn hybrids if this is simply a matter of believing in a self-fulfilling prophecy? Surely such a fantastic faith-based acceleration would be ideal for consumers and generate billions of dollars for investors. It would be easy to find entrepreneurs eager to believe in such prophecies.

So what is the curve of Moore's Law telling us that expert insiders don't see? That this steady acceleration is more than an agreement. It originates within the technology. There are other technologies, also solid-state materials, that exhibit a steady curve of progress, just as in Moore's Law. They, too, seem to obey a rough law of remarkably steady exponential improvement. Consider the cost performance of communication bandwidth and digital storage in the past two decades. The picture of their exponential growth parallels the integrated circuit's. Except for the slope, these graphs are so similar, in fact, that it is fair to ask whether these curves are just reflections of Moore's Law. Telephones are heavily computerized, and storage disks are organs of computers. Since progress in speed and cheapness of bandwidth and storage capacity rely directly and indirectly on accelerating computing power, it may be impossible to untangle the destiny of bandwidth and storage from computer chips. Perhaps the curves of bandwidth and storage are simply derivatives of the one uberlaw? Without Moore's Law ticking beneath them, would they even remain solvent?

In the inner circle of the tech industry the fast-paced drop in prices for magnetic storage is called Kryder's Law. It's the Moore's Law for computer storage and is named after Mark Kryder, the former chief technical officer of Seagate, a major manufacturer of hard disks. Kryder's Law says that the cost per performance of hard disks is decreasing exponentially at a steady rate of 40 percent per year. Kryder says that if computers stopped getting better and cheaper every year, storage would still continue to improve. In Kryder's own words: “There is no direct relationship between Moore's Law and Kryder's Law. The physics and fabrication processes are different for the semiconductor devices and magnetic storage. Hence, it is quite possible that semiconductor scaling could stop while scaling of disk drives continues.”

Larry Roberts, the principal architect of the ARPANET, the earliest version of the internet, keeps detailed stats on communication improvements. He has noticed that communication technology in general also exhibits a Moore's Law-like rise in quality. Roberts's curve shows a steady, exponential fall in communication costs. Might progress in wires also be correlated to progress in chips? Roberts says that the performance of communication technology “is strongly influenced by and very similar to Moore's Law but not identical as might be expected.”

Consider another encapsulation of accelerating progress. For a decade or so biophysicist Rob Carlson has been tabulating progress in DNA sequencing and synthesis. Graphed similarly to Moore's Law in cost performance per base pair, this technology, too, displays a steady drop when plotted on a log axis. If computers did not get better, faster, cheaper each year, would DNA sequencing and synthesis continue to accelerate? Carlson says: “If Moore's Law stopped, I don't think it would have much effect. The one area it might affect is processing the raw sequence information into something comprehensible by humans. Crunching the data of DNA is at least as expensive as getting the sequence of the physical DNA.”

The same kind of steady exponential progress that drives computer chips also drives three information industries, and the keenest observ-ers of these trajectories—the very founders of their respective “laws”—all believe that these trajectories of improvement are independent lines of acceleration and are not derivative of the overarching progress of computer chips.

Four Other Laws.
Photovoltaic cells: the cost of solar electricity drops (dollars per kilowatt) and is expected to continue in a linear fashion. Hard disks: the maximum density of storage available per year. DNA sequencing: The cost per base pair of DNA sequenced (dark line) or synthesized (light line) drops exponentially. Bandwidth: The cost per megabit per second drops exponentially.

Consistent, lawlike improvement must be more than self-fulfilling prophecy for another reason: This obedience to a curve often begins long before anyone notices there is a law, and way before anyone would be able to influence it. The exponential growth of magnetic storage began in 1956, almost a whole decade before Moore formulated his law for semiconductors and 50 years before Kryder formulized the existence of its slope. Rob Carlson says, “When I first published the DNA exponential curves, I got reviewers claiming that they were unaware of any evidence that sequencing costs were falling exponentially. In this way the trends were operative even when people disbelieved it.”

Inventor and author Ray Kurzweil dug into the archives to show that something like Moore's Law had its origins as far back as 1900, long before electronic computers existed, and of course long before the path could have been constructed by self-fulfillment. Kurzweil estimated the number of calculations per second per $1,000 performed by turn-of-the-century analog machines, by mechanical calculators, and later by the first vacuum-tube computers and extended the same calculation to modern semiconductor chips. He established that this ratio increased exponentially for the past 109 years. More important, the curve (let's call it Kurzweil's Law) transects five different technological species of computation: electromechanical, relay, vacuum tube, transistors, and integrated circuits. An unobserved constant operating in five distinct paradigms of technology for over a century must be more than an industry road map. It suggests that the nature of these ratios is baked deep into the fabric of the technium.

Kurzweil's Law.
Ray Kurzweil translated earlier calculating methods into a uniform metric of computation to yield a steady foreshadowing of Moore's Law.

Technology's imperative can be seen in the rigid acceleration of progress in DNA sequencing, magnetic storage, semiconductors, bandwidth, and pixel density. Once a fixed curve is revealed, scientists, investors, marketers, and journalists all grab hold of this trajectory and use it to guide experiments, investments, schedules, and publicity. The map becomes the territory. At the same time, since these curves begin and advance independent of our awareness and do not waver very much from a straight line under enormous competition and investment pressures, their course must in some way be bound to the materials.

To see how far this type of imperative extended into the technium I gathered as many examples of current exponential progress as I could find. I was not seeking examples where the total quantity produced (watts, kilometers, bits, base pairs, traffic, etc.) was rising exponentially, because these quantities are skewed by our rising population. More people use more stuff, even if it is not improving. Rather, I looked for examples that showed performance ratios (such as pounds per inch and illumination per dollar) steadily increasing, if not accelerating. On the opposite page is a set of quickly found examples, and the rate at which their performance is doubling. The shorter the time period, the faster the acceleration.

The first thing to notice is that all these examples demonstrate the effects of scaling down, or working with the small. We don't find exponential improvement in scaling up, as in making skyscrapers or space stations ever larger. Airplanes aren't getting bigger, flying faster, or becoming more fuel efficient at an exponential rate. Gordon Moore jokes that if the technology of air travel experienced the same kind of progress as Intel chips, a modern-day commercial aircraft would cost $500, circle the Earth in 20 minutes, and only use five gallons of fuel for the trip. However, the plane would only be the size of a shoebox!